VIDEO PREMIERES ON THE KELLY CLARKSON SHOW TODAY
FIRST TRACK OFF ANXIOUSLY AWAITED NEW ALBUM “AND THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE”
GRAMMY-Award-winning rock band OK Go have unveiled their brand new single, “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,” alongside a stunning official music video that premieres today on The Kelly Clarkson Show (check local listings). The track is the first single off the band’s forthcoming fifth studio album “And the Adjacent Possible”, which will arrive later this year.
“It’s a tough time to be optimistic. Getting through life requires some faith along the lines of the famous MLK quote: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,’” shares OK Go frontman, Damian Kulash. “But looking at the world unfurling before me, and especially before my children, it’s hard to find that kind of faith. What do we tell them? That’s what this song is about: trying to be honest but keeping your head up at the same time.”
Adding to OK Go’s vast catalog of ground-breaking music videos – they’ve danced on treadmills and with dogs; in time-lapse and slow motion; in zero-gravity, Rube Goldberg machines, and Super Bowl commercials – the clip for “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” features 64 videos on 64 phones laid out as a moving mosaic. The band did more than a thousand takes over the course of eight days, and the final video crams over two hours and twenty minutes of single-take clips into one frame. Once again directed by Kulash, this time in collaboration with Chris Buongiorno (Star Wars: Skeleton Crew), the clip showcases the band’s unbridled creativity and signature DIY aesthetic, while exploring the song’s lyrical take on modern split screen life.
“Trying to balance the anxiety (which is just realism) with the hope (which is just necessary) can often feel like living in a split screen, and that’s what inspired the video. It’s the most human, DIY version of a split screen that we could come up with,” explains Kulash.“Instead of using digital wizardry to glue multiple videos together, we shot one video for each of several dozen phones and laid them out, side-by-side, as a mosaic of screens. A single image emerges from all these separate pieces working sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord — the many contradictory parts of ourselves fighting to coalesce as a single whole.”
The innovative music video highlights how project management transforms bold ideas into captivating storytelling. Watch an exclusive behind-the scenes clip on Project Management Institute’s YouTube channel HERE.
Because of the videos’ long productions, the band’s rigorous touring schedule, outside projects (Kulash co-directed his first feature film The Beanie Bubble for Apple TV+), life changes (kids!), a global pandemic, and even a TED Talk, “And the Adjacent Possible” will arrive as OK Go’s first studio album in over a decade. Reflecting on nearly 30 years of collaboration, while continuing to look forward, the band emerged with its most diverse and accomplished collection of songs to date. “And the Adjacent Possible” is due for release later this year. Stay tuned for release date, tracklisting, and pre-order information.
Since their inception OK Go has been something more than a band and something different from an art project. With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, collaborations with pioneering dance companies, tech giants, NASA, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that encoded their music on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved. Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Timothy Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation and continue to add to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums. OK Go’s work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, and their achievements have been recognized with twenty-one Cannes Lions, twelve CLIOs, three VMAs, two Webbys, The Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and a Grammy. The band has also partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to create OK Go Sandbox, an educational non-profit that provides free resources to teachers that use OK Go’s videos as starting points to teach STEAM concepts.
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